vocabulary a smattering of Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. French and German he had learned at home. He was un-English in his gift for languages; un-English too in other ways, notably in his readiness to take color from his surroundings. During the next five years he generally passed for a Spaniard. He wandered over the length and breadth of America, going north to Los Angeles, west to Mollendo, south to Santiago de Chile: good cooks are in demand everywhere. He was a rolling stone, but he gathered moss, which he dutifully sent home to the Kentish rectory where he had been born.

At twenty-two he was in the Canaries, where Fate, intervening, pushed him into his true vocation. An Orotavan fondista, who had come into money and was wild to get home to Seville, offered him the goodwill of his place for a song. Gardiner accepted for the fun of the thing, and fell in love with his trade. Inns kept by a butler or a cook are proverbially prosperous, and he had been butler and cook in one. The Tres Amigos flourished; Gardiner's remittances home became regular and substantial. It seemed that he had found his niche at last.

He stayed in Orotava three years. Then, without warning, for the first time since his son left home, the rector missed his weekly letter. Four months went by, and Mr. Gardiner nearly fretted himself into his grave. At the end of that time the correspondence was taken up again--from Sydney. Over his reasons for this quick change to the Antipodes Gardiner threw an airy veil. "I was plenty sick of the Islands, I thought I'd get a move on," he wrote. Mr. Gardiner accepted the excuse in all good faith. Tom, his younger son, a conscientious young cadet, thought it sounded rather fishy; but Tom was always a little distrustful of this un-English brother of his.

The truth being that Gardiner had been burning his fingers in his first love affair. It was strange, in the life he had led, that he should have kept his innocence so long. He owed that to his mother, who had done what few mothers dare--taken her courage in both hands and told him plainly what to expect. Then she set the seal on her counsels by dying during his first voyage. She had been very fair, as well as very wise; her son never forgot her, and found it easier to follow her advice because her beauty and wits had trained his senses to be fastidious. But he had a passionate temperament under his superficial hardness, and, never having fribbled away his feelings in light connections, he came to Pilar Anguita with all the fire of unspoiled youth. In her pale tropical lily loveliness she seemed to him the incarnation of his dreams, flower of the Virgin for 

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